How to implement IDisposable Design Pattern in C#?

Java distinguishes disposable types from disposable types where dispose is idempotent . But we deal with managed classes, which deals directly with unmanaged objects. For example, File handlers, connection string, HTTP streams, etc. My implementation does not change the behavior, I just tried to make it more strict and predictable. I did not remove the _disposed flag, the only difference is that I put it at the beginning of the method to prevent re-disposing. First, the base class releases its resources, and then the derived one – thus, the derived class cannot release the resources of the base class.

Generation — 0 collection is therefore most performant as it collects only unused objects from its own generation and it is also most frequently garbage collected. Generation-2 collection is most expensive and it is default when you use GC.Collect() which we will talk about later. Now, let’s add an unmanaged resource to our class and see the changes we need to perform. In the example below, I’m adding a pointer to a chunk of 100 MB of unmanaged memory.

The Dispose Pattern Step by Step

My Car instance is still in memory but as soon as I hit enter, execution continues past the ReadLine call and exits the program. At that time, my Car instance goes out of the scope and is released by the GC. This result in a call to its destructor and “car DESTRUCTOR” is printed on the console. As we already explained, when an object is first created it sits in Generation-0 area of the managed heap and GC will frequently check this generation for any inactive objects. If CLR detects that an object is inactive, it will release the object and deallocate its memory making it available and free to use. Similarly, Generation-1 collection will collect unused objects in Generation-1 and Generation-0.

• Generation-2 is for longlived objects such as objects used for the lifetime of a process.
• Important aspect of this pattern is that it makes easier for inherited classes to follow the IDisposable design pattern.
• You can enforce it and specify the generation as well when you call it.
• Generation-1 contains short lived objects that have survived GC cycle in Generation-0 and are therefore promoted to Generation-1.

When the GC runs, it immediately removes from memory any garbage objects that do not have finalizers. These objects are added to a finalization queue, and the GC runs their finalizers in a separate thread. After the finalizer thread is done, the garbage objects can actually be removed from memory. They are moved up one generation because they survived a collection. They will be removed from memory on the next garbage collection of that higher generation. The Dispose Pattern in C# is all about the mechanics of effectively disposing of your instance fields that implement IDisposable and freeing up the unmanaged resources that you directly hold in your class.

Disposable Pattern

Further, some finalization work is sometimes needed, particularly for I/O, such as flushing buffers to ensure that all data is actually written. These handles can be used directly, by storing the value in a variable and passing it as an argument to functions that use the resource. Disposing can be ugly, we have no place being in there if we are going to judge the appearance of the code during the process of what is essentially taking our object to the toilet and wiping it’s bum. It is no surprise to find this pattern in Schildt’s C# book as this has always been a fundamental part of the lifecycle of an object instance in c#. And it turns out, when you don’t have a finalizer you can safely remove a lot of the code from the documented IDisposable pattern. At first I thought the question should be simple to ask, but your last example does seem better to me…

A key problem with the dispose pattern is that if the dispose method is not called, the resource is leaked. A common cause of this is early https://cryptominer.services/ exit from a function, due to an early return or exception. To avoid that, you can implement both Finalize method and IDisposable.

Then we call SuppressFinalize as already described. As you can see none of these call destructor since there is no need to call it, we already released our object and cleaned up all resources. Next we hit Enter to bypass the ReadLine statement and terminate application. This also did not call our destructor since we have already released our object. At this point, execution stops as program execution hits the ReadLine call on line 11.

We implement finalizer method to release unmanaged resources such as Windows handles, file handles and in general, any code created in a non .NET language such as VB6, ASP, COM, or using any of Windows APIs. Feel free to remove the elements and comments that you don’t need, but it helps make your code more accessible if you stick to the pattern that we all know and expect. In the Dispose() method, we clean up the managed and unmanaged resources.

As you can see above, Car is instantiated and constructor outputs to console. Then we dispose of our Car instance by calling Dispose method. This is the version of Dispose provided by IDisposable. From within that method, we call our own version and pass it true so it cleans up both managed and unmanaged resources. The derived class Dispose takes care of cleaning all the managed and unmanaged resources. The consumer of the object can call the first disposal method explicitly whenever the resources are no longer required.

It turns out it can be quite handy for managing scope of anything really. In the example below, I show how to use it to time events. If we instantiate Car class like below, the constructor is called and it outputs its line to the console as we can see below.

IDisposable Interface

Make sure you understand the sequence of steps above. This is how the classes collaborate in order to dispose of their resources adequately. Both the derived and the base class Dispose executions are completed now and the program flow returns to the public Dispose() method. In my opinion, the use case I presented above is by far the most common one. If it matches your scenario – do this simple implementation and stop there.

Thus by not coupling resource management to object lifetime, the dispose pattern allows resources to be released promptly, while giving implementation flexibility for memory management. The cost of this is that resources must be managed manually, which can be tedious and error-prone. This Software development articles for dummies interface defines single method called Dispose. And you use this method to clean up unmanaged resources yourself whenever you are done using unmanaged resources. So, it is your responsibility to clean up the resources. And that is a problem since users may forget to call Dispose.

@mu88 I am not sure what they are trying to accomplish or clarify with the second example. I think this is for a scenario in which you must descend from an existing class that is not disposable and you have something to dispose. Then you add disposable behavior somewhere in the inheritance hierarchy rather than at the root. But then again I do not see a Dispose() method yet it is called from the finalizer.

Yes we all make this assumption, but due to programmer discretion, threading and general bad design patterns, we all assume that some nufty will break our rules. Often it is an aggressive form of direct calling dispose in a UI that fires on close, but it happens in many other scenarios too. So the pattern provided is strongly advised to cater for the scenarios where dispose IS called multiple times. For example, let’s say you create a brand new, never before seen database system.

For example, files are provided by the operating system , which in many systems represents open files with a file descriptor . By using standard patterns, other developers and development tools are more likely to intrinsically understand and interact with your classes. This pattern has been developed over a number of years and is an aggregate of how we all used to do things in our own quirky ways.

At work I use it as much as I can but there are a few things visual studio is better at handling so I use that in some cases . Hard to live without modal editing once you commit to it – everything feels super slow in a normal editor after. The instructions and examples given here address the use of the feature in C#. For details specific to other languages, see corresponding topics in the ReSharper by language section.

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On .NET, IDisposable is defined by the base .NET Framework library. A using statement combines the declaration of a local variable that’s limited in scope to the statement contained within the using with an automatic call to Dispose at the end. // Release resource, even if an exception was thrown. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

Language constructs

For this reason, .NET implements IDisposable in all unmanaged code such as database connections. Now, let’s modify code above to see when this destructor is being called. As we already saw, it is called when our application terminates and Car object goes out of scope.

One disadvantage of this approach is that it requires the programmer to explicitly add cleanup code in a finally block. This leads to code size bloat, and failure to do so will lead to resource leakage in the program. The dispose pattern is hard to understand and until you need to override it, it is hard to see the value in this implementation. But when it goes wrong it is incredibly hard to debug, because it is often the last place we look but it is also hard to track outside of a using() block. And if users do call Dispose method, we prevent finalize method from being called by calling SuppressFinalize for this object.